The goal of the proposed study is to test the utility of a new psychological approach to understanding the determinants of contraceptive behavior. The study will utilize some methods and constructs of cognitive psychology to model the thinking processes used by Filipino migrants and their Caucasian neighbors in deciding about contraception. One hundred sixty married, fecund couples (80 Filipino and 80 Caucasian) living in Mountain View, California, will be interviewed by specially-trained Filipino and Caucasian graduate students from Stanford University. The interview will elicit: (1) demographic background information; (2) information on documented economic and sociological correlates of fertility-related behavior; (3) information on the context surrounding the contraceptive decision-making process; (4) protocols from open-ended questions that ask subjects to describe the decision-making process they used in arriving at their present and prior contraceptives and proceptive behavior; and (5) protocols from structured tasks that ask subjects to think aloud as they decide whether to contracept or not and, if so, which among sets of contraceptives presented to them they would choose. The analytic tools for analyzing the decision-making protocols will be adapted from the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Contraceptive choice will be viewed as bounded rational behavior in which a subject searches for some solution in a problem space of possible decision status. Individual descriptive models will be created for each subject's problem-solving behavior. The models will consist of: (1) the subject's representation of the problem space, including a description of initial and goal states and the operators used by the subject to control knowledge, or the rules used by the subject in traversing the space; these rules determine the search sequence or series of operators actually used by the subject. Cross-cultural differences in process-styles will be investigated. In addition, the extent to which process-style differences can explain failures to predict contraceptive behavior on the part of standard economic, sociological, and decision-theoretic approaches will be investigated. It is believed that the study's novel emphasis on user thinking processes, in conjunction with its relaxation of the utility maximization assumption of current approaches to the study of fertility-related behavior, will lead to heretofore undiscovered insights that could be productive in terms of suggesting ways in which policy and program interventions might affect behavior.